Lullaby - Leila Slimani Page 0,27

finishing a sentence without pausing for breath. She cooked an osso buco. After his third mouthful, as he was about to speak, Jacques threw it up all over his plate. It was projectile vomit, like a baby’s, and Louise knew it must be serious. That he wouldn’t get better. She stood up and, seeing Jacques’s bewildered expression, she said: ‘Don’t worry, it’s nothing.’ She talked constantly, accusing herself of having put too much wine in the sauce, which had made it acidic, spouting idiotic theories about heartburn. She talked and talked, gave advice, blamed herself and asked for forgiveness. Her quavering, incoherent logorrhoea only succeeded in intensifying the panic that had taken hold of Jacques, a fear akin to missing the top step of a staircase and seeing himself tumbling down, headfirst, his spine crushed, his flesh bloody. If she’d shut up, perhaps he could have wept, maybe he’d have asked for help or even a bit of tenderness. But as she cleared the table, as she cleaned the floor, she talked, ceaselessly.

Jacques died three months later. He dried up like a piece of fruit forgotten in the sun. It was snowing on the day of his funeral and the light was almost blue. Louise found herself alone.

She nodded as the notary explained, in an apologetic voice, that Jacques had left her only debts. She stared at the goitre crushed under his shirt collar and pretended to accept the situation. All she had inherited from Jacques were failed lawsuits, pending trials, unpaid bills. The bank gave her a month to leave the little house in Bobigny, which would be repossessed. Louise boxed everything up herself. She carefully collected the few things that Stéphanie had left behind. She didn’t know what to do with the piles of documents that Jacques had accumulated. She thought about setting fire to them in the little garden, imagining that, with a bit of luck, the blaze might spread to the house, the street, even the whole neighbourhood. In that way, this entire part of her life would go up in smoke. She would feel no sorrow if it did. She would stay there, motionless, discreet, to watch the flames devour her memories, her long walks in the dark empty streets, her bored Sundays with Jacques and Stéphanie.

But Louise picked up her suitcase, she double-locked the door and she left, abandoning in the entrance hall of the little house those boxes of memories, her daughter’s clothes and her husband’s schemes.

That night she slept in a hotel room, where she paid for a week’s stay in advance. She made sandwiches and ate them in front of the television. She sucked fig biscuits, letting them melt on her tongue. Solitude was like a vast hole into which Louise watched herself sink. Solitude, which stuck to her flesh, to her clothes, began to model her features, making her move like a little old lady. Solitude leapt at her face at dusk, when night fell and the sounds of family lives rose from the surrounding houses. The light dimmed and the murmur grew louder: laughter, panting, even sighs of boredom.

In that room, on a street in the Chinese quarter, she lost all notion of time. She felt lost, crazed. The whole world had forgotten her. She would sleep for hours and wake up swollen-eyed, her head aching, despite the cold that seethed through the room. She only went out when she absolutely had to, when her hunger became too painful to ignore. She walked in the street as if it were a cinema set and she were not there, an invisible spectator to the movements of mankind. Everyone seemed to have somewhere to go.

*

Solitude was like a drug that she wasn’t sure she wanted to do without. Louise wandered through the streets in a daze, eyes so wide open that they hurt. In her solitude, she started to see other people. To really see them. The existence of others became palpable, vibrant, more real than ever. She observed, in minute detail, the gestures of couples sitting on terraces. The sideways glances of torpid old people. The self-conscious expressions of students who sat on benches and pretended to revise. In squares, outside metro stations, she would recognise the strange parade of the impatient. Like them, she waited for someone. Every day, she would encounter companions in madness: tramps, lunatics, talking to themselves.

The city, back then, was full of madmen.

Winter comes, and the days blur into each other. November is rainy and